


Nature, Nurture; Heaven, Home

by matadelanimasola



Category: True Blood
Genre: F/M, Gen, Unreliable Narration, allusions to f/m, canon character death, inappropriate interpretation of ancient myths, mixing tenses like cocktails, one instance of crude language and a sideways reference to sex, spoilers for canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-17 14:37:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11277324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matadelanimasola/pseuds/matadelanimasola
Summary: Inanna the Goddess and Inanna the Woman used to be the same person, until they weren't. Godric the Man and Godric the Vampire were never the same person. What's a thousand years here or there between immortals?





	Nature, Nurture; Heaven, Home

**Author's Note:**

> The culmination of sitting on this for several years in many iterations.

Inanna is old. She’s been old since she was born. Being groomed from infancy to be the living embodiment of a goddess takes a toll. So much of her life was spent portraying Inanna the Goddess that she never had a chance to be herself. No childhood, no adolescence, no adulthood. In every aspect save the literal, she _was_ the goddess.

Until one day that wasn’t the case anymore.

It wasn’t a sudden revelation, more a sneaking realization. That she had stopped aging, and she had- power. _God-touched_ , the whispers said. _The longer one spent pretending to be something, the closer to that thing they became_ . Inanna the Goddess crept into her mind, her personality, cried for carnal pleasures and the thrill of battle. Inanna the Woman, Inanna the Head Priestess, crept into the shadows. The god-touched tended not to survive for very long once they were found out, and Inanna the Woman had no desire to die. So she withdrew from court, withdrew from the social scene of Ur. It took years, most of a decade, but one day she was _free_.

It was the start of a thousand years of freedom. More than that, in fact. Several thousand years. Inanna the Woman reveled in her liberation; the whole world was at her fingertips and she took in everything it had to offer. In those early days she was more Goddess than Woman, full of lust and violence and often the twain did meet.

Two thousand years she wandered from place to place ( _How long has she lived here?_ the people whisper, _How old is she? She hasn’t aged a day…_ ), until she found herself in Rome. Something shifts in the market one day. Some ~~thing~~ one catches her eyes. He’s young, but how young she couldn’t say. Millennia under her belt makes it hard for her to judge human age anymore; he could have been fifteen or fifty for all she could tell. She doesn’t approach. His master hovers just over his shoulder and she makes it a rule to never make acquaintances. Too many questions, too messy, too many moves in too short a time.

But she keeps seeing him. Inanna the Goddess fades and Inanna the Woman flourishes. She’s heard tell of Gaul, but never found within herself a desire to leave for Britannia. Not enough sun, not enough heat. Even Rome was pushing the limits of her tolerance for cold weather. Snow was a completely foreign concept. Maybe it was for the best that Inanna the Goddess finally faded. It had been a _very_ long time since any had spoken Her name in reverence, added to her power through their worship. Time for a regime change, and Inanna the Woman embraced whatever remnants of the goddess’ power remained.

So she watches and waits. Leaves and returns. Realizes that neither the man (boy?) or his master age, and never venture out in the sun. She had heard of the blood-suckers in the streets. Whispered stories to scare children to bed at night. It’s the only explanation; they’re not god-touched, she would feel that like an itch under her skin she couldn’t scratch.

She leaves one day and returns sometime later. Days, months, years; time tends to lose meaning when one is immortal. She doesn’t see him or his Sire again. Word on the grapevine is that the Sire is dead, a grisly murder that would have pleased Inanna the Goddess. (A part of Inanna the Woman that still worships the Goddess finds _ecstasy_ and _power_ in that.) Rome holds no pull for her anymore and she turns her back on it for a final time.

The world is infinitely larger than she ever dreamed it could be back when she was simply the head priestess of a violent and loving goddess. Yet even in a world that large, she finds him again. Godric, she learns his name is. Inanna, she calls herself. If she ever had her own name it was lost to time two thousand years before. Their paths cross over and over across the centuries. He is the one constant in her life, she in his. Over the years she develops an interest in the expanding globe. Fingers in many pies, our Inanna. She acts on almost nothing, but watches everything with an eye trained by hundreds of generations of Man.

She doesn’t see Godric again for many years. She wonders if he doesn’t approve of her network until word reaches her of another. _Eric_. His Childe; her competition for Godric’s attention. She would never admit it to anyone, least of all herself, but the time they spend together (however infrequent) keeps her going through all the long years of her life. Inanna the Goddess shines when they are together, all bloodied teeth and frenzied fucking in pools of mutually spilled blood.

The idea of a Childe sits oddly in her chest. Inanna the Goddess fertilizes fields and wombs alike, and Inanna the Woman bore many children in her tenure as head priestess. Making _un_ life through death was _wrong_. She avoids Godric. She doesn’t know how to reconcile that kind of procreation with her own worldview. Thoughts on her own nature and how unnatural it is spring unbidden to her mind and she quashes them violently by throwing herself into as many battles as she can. Inanna the Goddess sings in her mind, and for the first time in millennia her blood _hums_ with power.

The next time they meet is unexpected to both parties. Eric has long since flown the coop, but she still doesn’t know how to look at his Sire. Godric has mellowed with age (how long has it been since they first met in Rome all those long years ago?), but Inanna has not. The goddess’ influence still holds strong over her, no matter how long it was since anyone last worshiped Her. Godric rails, as mad as she’s ever seen him. _Too close,_ the remnants of the Goddess whispers in her mind. _This is what happens when you get too close._

Inanna the God-Touched runs and only looks back when she’s as far as she dares get, as far as she dares stretch the unseen umbilicus that binds her to Godric. She gives no reason in the letter she writes him, only expresses her regret at not saying good-by.

He never responds.

She never knows if it’s because her letter never found him or if he simply chose not to reply.

Until a letter finds her one day and she learns of his newest Childe. She never replies to any of the letters he sends her ( _'_ _I_ _know you receive these. I never expected this level of hypocrisy from you. You refuse to meet my Children, yet have no trouble with me, Made as I was.’)._

She doesn’t speak to him for a hundred years.

She moves to the Americas to flee her guilt.

On the streets of New Amsterdam, Fate intervenes in the dead of winter. One thing leads to another and they move into an opulent flat in a trendy neighborhood. There is no sign of Godric’s Children, and an easily silenced side of her wonders if Godric told them to stay away. Those years are a reconciliation of sorts. Inanna never says it in so many words, but she missed her oldest friend deeply, though _friend_ seems hardly a sufficient word for what he is to her. She suspects some small part of him feels the same. They fake a marriage for propriety’s sake; luckily the social life they’re expected to live at their rank in society is forgiving of Godric’s inability to go out in the daylight. For years they play the part of the perfect married couple, moving often enough to avoid suspicion when people start realizing just how long they’ve lived there and how youthful they still look…

Wars rise and fall. French and Indian. A war of Revolution. 1812. The fledgling United States’ own Civil War. It’s not until the Great War that the fragile perfection they have built together shatters. Inanna the Goddess _howls_ for blood, and Inanna the Woman leaves for Europe to slake her thirst. It’s miserable and cold, but her soul thrums to be elbow-deep in blood and gore once more. When Inanna the Goddess is sated, and Inanna the Woman returns to the brownstone she shared for so many years with the only person in the world who truly knows her, she finds it empty. No note, no explanation.

And then the Second Great War comes, and through the gale in her soul she wonders at the tentative relationship she has forged anew with Godric. Correspondence rekindled from wherever they were on the continent at any given time, a fragile thing she was afraid to think on too deeply for fear of breaking it. He leaves to join Eric in Europe, and she realizes with a sinking heart that she can’t stand to see him go. (She refuses to acknowledge the voice that asks if this was maybe how _he_ felt when she gallivanted off to the Western Front thirty years earlier.) He’s so young, so fragile; so susceptible to all the things she isn’t. If there’s anything in the world capable of ending her long years of existence, it has yet to reveal itself.

He comes back changed, she can feel it in her bones. Whatever he saw across that sea left an indelible mark on his very being. _Took you long enough,_ Inanna the Goddess cries. _Was this_ my _doing?_ Inanna the Woman wonders. Those thoughts take root in her very being, and she follows him quietly wherever he moves. She dislikes the melancholy that grow seeds in the deepest parts of him, resisting all her attempts to weed them out. She hides the cracking of her heart when he speaks of how his life has been long, too long. She moves to Dallas and eventually into his Nest. To keep an eye on him, she tells herself. Just until this phase of his has passed. Until the day it does pass and more, and Inanna retreats into herself.

Inanna the Goddess mourns for a partner lost to the slow ravages of time.

Inanna the Woman mourns deeper for the only steadfast thing in her existence. Hindsight comes with 20/20 rose-colored glasses, after all.

It takes Godric meeting the sun for Inanna to finally meet Eric. She sees so much of the Sire in the Childe that it shatters her heart in one fell blow and she sweeps all the many pieces into a corner to deal with later. She looks at him, back in his suite, with unshed tears bright in her eyes, and speaks her first words to him.

“We have so much to talk about.”


End file.
